Comedy Sex God

by Pete Holmes

  The first thing I did was, I went on eBay and bought the issue of Playboy I had found in my brother’s room. My subconscious needed symbols, I told myself, and I needed to show it that I was making some new rules about sex in a visual way. Browsing by year and cover, I found it, decisively used the “Buy It Now” option, and three to five business days later, instead of hiding it in the lining of a chair in my bedroom, I kept it out in the open, proudly on my coffee table for all to see. Like a swinger. Or Burt Reynolds.

  I stopped beating myself up for jerking off, making it a rule to give myself a break for doing something that every single person in the history of the world has done throughout all of known time. I started talking about being single more often onstage without embarrassment—I know it’s weird to think that I was embarrassed to be single, but I was—and I realized quickly why so many comics talk about not having a girlfriend onstage: it’s an advertisement for being available, like stage Tinder, and I started meeting people after shows.

  To my surprise, taking someone home really was like I had seen in the movies. After some laughs, and some drinks, I just had to summon my inner Don Draper and pretend to be a grown-up long enough to say, “Do you want to get out of here?” It turns out that’s a real line, and a favorite for a reason. You’re not burning with desire, it seems, you just want a change of scenery. You blame the place. “Let’s get out of here!” Like suddenly the bar you were in started feeling stuffy.

  The first time I had sex with someone I met at a show—with a little help from doctor-prescribed pharmaceuticals for both anxiety and male performance—the woman joked afterward, “I thought you weren’t a ‘fuck guy,’” referencing an episode of my podcast in which Mulaney and I laid out the difference between “fuck guys” and “relationship guys,” both of us declaring ourselves to be the latter. I laughed and replied, “I’m not.” But as I fastened my belt, I wondered: Am I? Was this step one of three that leads to me buying shag carpeting, growing a mustache, and keeping a pearl-handled pistol on my coffee table like a real sex person?

  I spent the rest of the year figuring it out. Compared with some of my friends—true fuck guys—I wasn’t having a ton of sex, but it would happen for me every other week or so. Seeing that the world of single people wasn’t what I had been told it was in church—desperate, sad, and ugly—was incredibly healing. Sure, there were some nights of sheer drunken fun, but a lot of it was actually lovely—safe and therapeutic. There was laughing. And silliness. And true, if disposable, connection. The strangest thing was, if you were nice, charming, and not too scummy, sometimes crazy things would happen. Crazy things you wouldn’t believe, or at least you wouldn’t believe would happen to a guy like me. Crazy things like going home with more than one person.

  I know. What the fuck? Even as I write this, I can’t believe that happened. But it turned out, every once in a while, you’d run into two people looking to hook up with a third. And sometimes I was that person.

  What I’m saying is, I had a threesome . . .

  . . . with two women, not the other kind. I never really wanted another dude there. To be honest, I was never crazy about the fact that my penis was in the room, let alone two. And the type of women who wanted to take me home were usually looking for someone with a lot of feminine energy, and that I have. Someone soft and nonthreatening. I was basically a third woman. It was incredible.

  There was sex, for sure—don’t get me wrong, that was amazing—but honestly what I remember looking back was a feeling of timelessness. It reminded me of mushrooms. That wonderful feeling, as you might imagine with so many body parts in one room, of not wanting to be anywhere else in the world. I had gotten glimpses of that feeling, but no matter what amazing thing I had been doing, there had always been a voice in my head comparing the experience with others and weighing my options for something else. But on those nights, I had an experience to which nothing previously compared, so I was just there—laughing, playing music, having a threeway. My brain had finally found what it was looking for, so it stopped looking and just enjoyed it. It was bliss. We’d order food, or smoke cigarettes like you’re supposed to, sharing the bed sleeping like a pile of noodles.

  My whole adult life, I had wished there had been some sort of sex summer camp, some place where beautiful hippie teachers would guide and coach formerly religious weirdos like me to get over their hang-ups and just groove, baby. I had so many cobwebs on this topic filling my subconscious, I would’ve paid a lot of money to have them removed by a professional in some sort of erotic forest, probably near Woodstock, New York.

  But it turns out I could also be healed, at least partially, for free, in the wild.

  As with every guy to whom this amazing convergence of both a Super Bowl and World Series happens on the same field at the same time, I couldn’t wait to tell my friends about it, specifically my fellow non-fuck-guy Mulaney, who was raised Catholic and I knew would understand what I meant when I said it felt healing.

  “It’s sex with a witness,” John said. “Sex always feels dirty to guys like us. Having someone else there who’s also enjoying it must have been very nice for you. It’s like having a notary present.”

  I told Kumail and Emily, too, and they couldn’t stop laughing and giving me high fives. I had gone out a Puritan, worried and afraid, and came back only a few months later with some pretty good stories to share.

  “It’s like we dropped our kid off at Whore Island and we didn’t know how he’d do,” Emily joked. “And we came back to pick him up and he had made his own car out of coconuts.”

  IN DECEMBER 2012, I WAS COHEADLINING COBB’S COMEDY Club in San Francisco with another Lyons Den alumni, Kyle Kinane. I had gotten in the habit of doing meet and greets after the show, which usually was just something fun to do, and a good way for me to come down after doing stand-up—which, as anyone who’s done it knows, feels like free cocaine your body makes. It’s nice, and a rush, but it also makes it impossible to go directly to bed.

  But that night, the last person I met was a young blond woman with blue-green eyes, standing in the lobby in a spotted blue dress. A young woman named Valerie.

  I’m sure as I get older, this story will blur into a tale of love at first sight that I tell my grandchildren, but you know what? Here, now, not yet senile, that’s not entirely untrue. She was beautiful, sure, and lit up the room, yes, but there was a vibration, something unspeakable resonating between us right away.

  We chatted briefly, and I was relieved to learn that she wasn’t a huge fan of mine but just a regular person out for a night of fun and had listened to my podcast only a handful of times. I told her I was going to get a drink at the bar with the red neon martini glass next door (I wasn’t), as I just wanted to get a drink after my show (I didn’t). Clearly I wanted an excuse to spend more time with her. Luckily, she obliged.

  In the year that followed, Val and I would meet in San Francisco once a month, then twice a month, then every other week, falling in love partly because we were long distance and both of us thought it could never get too serious. But it did. We bonded hard and fast over similar upbringings—she’s a PK (pastor’s kid) and knew as much about the church as I did, and we enjoyed tearing apart our old faiths as much as we enjoyed discovering new ways to mend and rescue them. I was struck by the fact that how I was trying to be with all my spiritual “work,” Val just naturally was. She didn’t meditate or take psychedelics, but she was still a natural spring of presence, light, and love.

  Over oysters at the tourist-filled Pier 39 in San Francisco, she told me about the book Love Wins by the spiritual teacher Rob Bell (another book that went on to change my life and the way I view God for the better). We’d smoke pot and give too much money to street performers. We’d stay in and order every dessert on the room service menu, laying them out on the bedspread like Kevin McCallister in Home Alone 2.

  It wasn’t even a month when I felt the strong urge to tell her I loved her, but hearing Emily’s voice in my h
ead, I thought better of it and kept that secret to myself, just eating more pancakes, seeing more movies, and spending entire Saturdays watching infomercials on our hotel bed, making jokes and laughing our asses off. She was smart, and kind, and funny, and just the safest, warmest hiding spot I had ever found in which to shield myself from the stresses and fears of life. And she liked me, too.

  Eventually we cut out the middle city, and she started flying in to visit me in LA—and finally, after she finished laughing at my emotionally healing open-air Playboy magazine, I managed to say to her, still unsure if it was too soon, “Would it be okay to tell you I love you?”

  “Yes,” she replied. “Because I love you, too.”

  Shortly after, I bought a house in my neighborhood, secretly knowing in my heart that it would be the house we would share and raise a family in. We were still long distance, but all that stuff they say about knowing when you know turns out to be true, and I asked her to move in with me. Suddenly her plans to move “somewhere in LA” became plans to move in with me, and shortly after our bags were unpacked, in a perfectly symbolic gesture of how my life had changed from the tense, we-don’t-want-any-trouble environment of my childhood, we got a dog, my first, a rescue named Brody. I’d walk him, happy that my life for the first time was spacious enough to accommodate this furry, elective chaos, holding a bag of his poop like I had just been at a carnival where I had won some terrible goldfish, blissed out at what my life was becoming.

  My friends joked, “When’s the wedding?”

  crashing

  AROUND THIS TIME, THE PETE HOLMES SHOW WAS CANCELED after a respectable but brief eighty-episode run, and I found myself in the peculiar position of having absolutely no idea what I was going to do next.

  My friend and producer Oren Brimer didn’t let me wallow. The day the news broke, instead of retreating to a dive bar, we got together and enthusiastically discussed ways we could leverage our experience into another TV show. People would meet with us now, so we decided to hit the ground running and pitch a sketch show to Comedy Central.

  I drove to Santa Monica eager and full of hope, but in the part of the meeting before you get to the pitch where everyone just checks in and asks how everyone’s doing, the head of the network casually joked, “Well, one thing’s for sure, we don’t want another sketch show!” Everyone laughed, including me and Oren, but secretly I started sweating through the shirt and tie I had stolen from TBS’s wardrobe department.

  We pretended we’d just popped by to say hello.

  Sitting alone in my car, I felt a wave of frustration. I didn’t want to drive home without some idea of what I might be doing in the year to come. So instead of asking myself what I thought I could do, I asked myself what, if I could do anything, would I want to do?

  What story could I tell that no one else could?

  For the first time, I considered telling my entire story. A young man, raised in the church, whose wife leaves him, whose world falls apart, and who is thrown into the world of stand-up comedy. That’s fine, I thought. But shows need a hook. What would make this one different? My faith, sure. But I didn’t think that was enough. Then, in the way that only frustration and fear can, an idea was pushed out from the back of my brain: He’s homeless. He has no money, nowhere to stay, so he has to crash on the couch of a different comedian every episode.

  That was it. It was a show with an engine, something exciting and clear that would help a network get the idea, and get it quickly.

  I had an idea. It reminded me of Knocked Up, another story about a calamity pushing a man-child into adulthood, and The 40-Year-Old Virgin, whose protagonist was as naive and inexperienced as I was—which meant there was only one person I wanted to pitch it to.

  JUDD APATOW—ANOTHER COMEDY HERO OF MINE, alongside Conan—was in New York City that week filming Amy Schumer’s Trainwreck, and after a few calls from my manager, I got word that Judd was a fan of The Pete Holmes Show and was willing to listen to my pitch. I had no idea if one of the busiest and most powerful men in Hollywood had any room in his life for a new TV show, but his assistant told me he had fifteen free minutes that Friday morning. It was Wednesday afternoon. I was in LA.

  I booked my flight.

  Scribbling notes on a Delta cocktail napkin, I arrived late Thursday night and set four alarms and a wake-up call so as to not miss my shot. Anxiety woke me up before any of them went off. I arrived so early at the set that I had to kill about an hour before our seven o’clock meeting, nervously nursing a coffee and picking at a scone as I rehearsed my pitch out loud, not caring that anyone might see me as it was Manhattan and I was one of three people talking to himself that I could see.

  I spent the first fourteen minutes of the pitch talking with Judd about stand-up—he had just gotten back into it himself—and our shared love of Steve Martin before trying to make the line I had rehearsed sound natural: “I’m not pitching this to you because you can make it happen, I’m pitching this to you because it seems like the kind of story you like to tell.” There it was. I had laid it on the table—the professional equivalent of “Do you want to get out of here?”—and I was just as nervous.

  He didn’t say he loved it. He didn’t say “I’m in.” He listened, seemed interested enough, and told me to write the script. I spent the rest of the day hanging out, watching Amy and Vanessa Bayer shoot a scene, and in between takes Judd would tell me stand-up premises he was working on. In the cab to the airport the next morning, unsure if it would look cool or desperate, I typed up an email offering him punch lines and possible tags for the stand-up bits he had run by me. By the time I reached my gate, he had replied, “This is the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for me.”

  Two days later, I sent him the pilot for Crashing.

  rammy d

  MY CAREER HAD FOUND ITS NEXT TRAJECTORY AND, as everything in show business moves in slow motion, I had many months of free time before Judd and I would even pitch Crashing to HBO. So I had time to myself. Time to meditate, and wonder, and eventually circle back to the “banana guru” and “LSD guy” Duncan had turned me on to.

  It was time for me to look into Ram Dass.

  I made the understandable mistake of starting with Ram Dass’s seminal work, Be Here Now, the 1978 spiritual classic printed in wild, irregular type on square, crispy brown paper that you read holding sideways like a Playboy centerfold. I didn’t know much about it other than Duncan loved it and that Steve Jobs said it changed his life.

  The title alone, Be Here Now, was an appealing lesson for me, having been raised in a family where we discussed what to have for dinner while we were eating lunch, so I figured, hey, if even the title of this book is paying out for me, it must be worth the $1.99 extra for one-day shipping. I might as well put a rush on a book that was going to undoubtedly shepherd me to enlightenment, peace, and eternal bliss.

  It did nothing for me.

  I flipped through it, confused and disappointed, trying to make sense of its esoteric words—“Desire is the creator, desire is the destroyer, desire is the universe”—and its strange drawings, images like the goddess Kali wearing a necklace of human skulls, salivating blood, spread eagle, giving birth. I came up short. It just looked like a bunch of hippies had silk-screened random images from acid trips onto the back of brown paper grocery bags and printed a bunch of gobbledygook around them, some of the letters huge, some of them so small you needed a magnifying glass to make them out.

  I ended up using the book as a coaster.

  LUCKILY FOR ME, A FEW MONTHS LATER I FOUND MYSELF bored on an airplane and ended up listening to Experiments in Truth, a collection of lectures Ram Dass had given in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. I was shocked that what seemed like mumbo jumbo in print made immediate, instant sense to me when I heard it spoken aloud. Stuck in a middle seat for hours, I suddenly didn’t care that there were no TVs in the seatbacks or that neither armrest had been yielded to me by my inconsiderate neighbors. Ram Dass’s style was calm but engaging, h
onest, and very funny. And not church funny—comedian funny.

  I learned that before Ram Dass became Ram Dass he had been Richard Alpert, a very successful and respected psychologist and professor at Harvard. The similarities in our two journeys was staggering: we were both from Boston; both Aries, which meant we were both stubborn and driven; we both took mushrooms for the first time at the same age (thirty); and we both subsequently became obsessed with the nature of consciousness and the implications the substances had given us concerning the divine.

  Alpert was introduced to mushrooms by another Harvard professor, Timothy Leary, whom Alpert referred to as a mischievous “Irish elf,” and whom Richard Nixon would later call the most dangerous man in America. After Timothy had a wild experience in South America eating mushrooms called teonanacatl—“The flesh of the gods”—he reported that he learned more about the human mind in four hours than he had in his many years studying psychology. Alpert was curious and decided to give it a try.

  On his first trip, snowed in during a blizzard in Leary’s house in Newton, Mass., Alpert had the experience of seeing each of his social roles—Harvard professor, pilot, son—manifest in front of him and then vanish, as if he were being given an otherworldly PowerPoint presentation, which culminated in the terrifying experience of watching his own body disappear before his very eyes. From foot, to knee, to chest, to head, he was gone—no body, nobody—and in his place just a vacant patch, lying empty.